Editorial: Victory for Obamacare and one for the history books

View full sizeFile photo by Pablo Martinez / Associated PressThe justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are seen at the Supreme Court in Washington in 2010. Seated from left are Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Standing, from left are Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito Jr., and Elena Kagan. The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul.

It was a win for President Obama. It was a win for Democrats in Congress. It was a win for the Supreme Court in general, and for Chief Justice John Roberts specifically.

True and true and true. But more than anything else, Thursday’s high court ruling that largely upheld Obamacare was a win for the nation, for the American people.

And it was undeniably a win for the history books. To look past the politics, past the process, past even the personalities, one comes eventually to history, to the reason why the president and Democrats took on health care in the first place, risking so much, persisting seemingly against all odds.

Go back fully a century, and you’ll find Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican – yes, there once were progressive Republicans – looking for a way to see that all the nation’s citizens had sufficient health coverage. Presidents over the decades gave health care a look, but the cause was ever-elusive. It began to seem that it would never happen. But Obama saw his victory in 2008 as a mandate, and he worked with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress – with no help from Republicans – to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Since the legislation, commonly called Obamacare, was signed into law, Republican opponents have vowed to repeal it. Well, that was their initial idea, anyway. But then they amended their rallying call, fairly chanting that their goal was to “repeal and replace.” Opponents said this so often that they seemed actually to believe that the citizens would think they had a plan.

Except that they didn’t. Replace it with what? Opponents have never said. Or really even hinted at what might come next. “Repeal and run for cover,” though, obviously lacked a certain something.

A quick question for those who would wish for the demise of the landmark health-care legislation: How were things working before Obamacare? With literally scores of millions of the nation’s citizens lacking health insurance, leaving them just one serious illness or accident from disaster, with prices rising and rising, constantly outpacing the rate of inflation, the system was badly broken.

When President Bill Clinton’s ambitious health-care proposal crashed and burned early in his first term, a debacle that ended with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress for the first time in more than four decades, a chastened Clinton tacked quickly toward the political center, angering the left even as he saved his presidency.

One might reasonably have assumed that it would be generations before another president would have had the courage to take on health care again. Obama took up the cause just a decade and a half later.

Those who opposed the president’s health-care proposal for specific reasons quickly became indistinguishable from the people who were the enemies of the administration more generally. Because they were, after all, one in the same. For these folks, nothing to come off the drawing boards at the White House would have been any good – even if it had earlier been their own idea.

This was the case with the individual mandate, the requirement that all citizens either buy health insurance or pay a penalty. Twenty years ago, this was a conservative notion, the brainchild of the right wing, embraced by Republicans aplenty.

But once Obama got on board, the mere thought of the mandate was socialism.

We’ve got nothing but praise for Obama and the efforts of Democrats in Congress. The president saw an opportunity to be consequential, to implement a plan that had been eluding chief executives for a century. And he seized the day.